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No gold medals as yet for Team GB, but BBC Online has set new records with its coverage of the first 48 hours of the games.

The London Olympics has been widely trailed as much of a challenge for the nation’s broadcaster as much as its athlete but so far the BBC has more than passed muster, with the broadcaster delivering up to 24 simultaneous live streams of coverage to the biggest audience the Sport website has ever seen across desktop, mobile tablet, connected TVs and Red Button.

Right from the start the viewing numbers have been huge with 1.7 million requests for Danny Boyle’s masterpiece of an Olympics opening ceremony on the BBC iPlayer, with 925,000 on Saturday 28 July alone – a record for a single day. The same day saw 7.8 million global browsers access bbc.co.uk/sport, 5.6 million of which were UK browsers, a global record. This was bettered the next day with 8.3 million global browsers for bbc.co.uk/sport with 6.1 million UK browsers.

Revealing how the effort has been so far, and with no small degree of relief, Cait O'Riordan, Head of Product for BBC Sport, said: “We have been testing the infrastructure and the sites we have built for the games for months using test data and streams and artificial traffic and we were really confident it would work. But even so it’s nerve wracking turning it all on and showing it to vast numbers of real users – so we are thrilled that it’s all working so well.